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Message: <blockquote data-quote="JoeGKushner" data-source="post: 2522317" data-attributes="member: 1129">A different type of monster book.Beast Builder Written by Joseph BrowningPublished by Expeditious Retreat Press<a href="http://www.exp.citymax.com" target="_blank">www.exp.citymax.com</a>ISBN: 0-9729376-6-8Stock Number: XRP1004224 b & w pages$35.00While many people, including myself, enjoy seeing how others make monsters in books like the Monsternomicon or Tome of Horrors, there is something innately enjoyable as a game master in customizing your own monsters. One way to do this, is by taking existing monsters and using a template, such as those found in the Advanced Bestiary or the Deluxe Book of Templates.Despite some of the math involved in the changes, that’s still the easy way and still might not result in the unique monster you’re looking for.Enter the Beast Builder.The book is broken up into seven chapters and contains three appendices.  Layout is standard two column format. Art is provided by Rick Hershey, Ash Jackson, Mates Laurentiu, Michael Lo Presti and Jason Walton. Art for the most part is fantastic with some truly great pieces illustrating the work. Good news as there isn’t a ton of art and you’ll go pages sometimes without a single illustration. Tables tend to be boxed and have huge amounts of white space for ease of reading, but tend to look a bit low grade compared to the standard table layouts found in most products that don’t rely on pages and spacing for readability. The book starts off with monster concepts and functions. This chapter includes different bits ranging from where you can find inspiration from monsters, ranging from folklore and myth, to changing those very abilities it’s supposed to have from myth to present something truly different. Perhaps more useful to those already with a concept in mind, is monster functions.What role will the monster play in the game, and what can you compare it to that’s already been done? Several monster functions are included and a breakdown of existing monsters in the SRD and the Monster Geographica Underground are included. For example, some monsters are masters of pinning their foes. They fall under the grappler concept. They join such creatures as the cloaker, snake, dire lion and owlbear. Other monsters are there to help the players and include creatures like the blink dog or copper dragon. Of course if you’re running an evil campaign, these beasts may fall under a different category.It’s a good start to getting your mind wrapped around the concept theme. How will your monster make it mark in the world? What is its primary function in terms of fighting?After looking that over, the book moves into monsters and their environment. It’s a little dry reading, but goes into enough detail, briefly, to give the reader an idea of what role the monster will play in its environment. For some game masters and players, the more realistic the monster’s impact on the ecology and environment about him, the better it is. This chapter covers things like food webs and niches, briefly going over terms like predatory and herbivore-predator prey systems. It’s a good read for those wondering why a monster simply doesn’t eat everything in it’s path, including the fact that many predator’s have more than one prey to protect themselves in case something happens to one food supply.Some of the material also covers how the creature fits into it’s environment in terms of it’s own lifestyle and habitat. What type of mechanism does it uses for respiration? How does it handle changes in temperature? How does it reproduce? By providing these broad categories of information, the game master can focus on answering the questions using the examples provided.It’s helpful to know what type of environment might house what type of beast, and the book provides a breakdown of the different types of environments in a typical fantasy milieu. This includes the standard, like forests, but also breaks down those broad categories into things like coniferous forest, taiga, montane, temperate, broadleaf, deciduous, and tropical rain forest.It’s a meaty chapter and includes ideas on evolution and speciation. How do creatures adapt to their environment? How do variations of the same monster come about? How does mutation flourish? Because not all monsters are unintelligent, there is some brief discussion on what type of cultures a monster may have. It’s done in the form of questions for the game master to think about what the monsters culture would need.Players will probably be more interested in the section discussing monsters as races. This is a good summary of how hit dice, class levels, and effective character level work in game play, providing ideas on how to calculate ability scores.Some game masters though, don’t want to concern themselves with what the monster eats, as long as the players are included on that list. Instead, they’re more interested in the actual mechanics of the monster. That’s where chapter three comes in, monster statistics. This chapter provides breakdowns for many areas of monster construction. Want to know how monsters advance by hit dice, attack bonus, skill points, and saving throws? That’s all under table 3.3 with type information. Want a listing of how size and CR affect each other? That’s table 3.4, where we see that the CR for a large creature starts at one and usually ends at twenty-three.  How about how CR and hit dice are related or how to estimate natural armor class? All covered.While it’s nice that the author tried to minimize the book flipping by repeating the table on increased damage by size, since it’s done with other tables as well, the repeating information should’ve been limited so that there was more room for more examples, art, or sidebars on how different aspects were looked at to come up with the numbers. This section includes just about everything you need to start understanding just how complex that building a monster can be. It includes details on what skill synergies happen withwhich skills, the monster feats from the SRD, ability modifiers and bonus spells from one to forty five, as well as advancement and ideas on how to handle level adjustment. Now for those looking for more ideas on how type fits into monster concept, chapter four, type and subtype, is where you want to start digging. It repeats the base information, with a table exactly the same as in chapter three, and then the breakdown of what that means, which means repeated information in terms of hit dice, base attack, good saves, and skill points. ON the other hand, it also includes traits, like which types have darkvision, what weapons are the different types proficient with, and more importantly, designer notes. Sometimes this includes a breakdown of what special abilities or special qualities a monster has, as well as a general overview of how powerful or difficult it is to classify the type.For example, the angel subtype is a powerful creature and the designer notes include the fact that all angles have damage reduction, and more than half have regeneration or spell use. On the other hand, constructs generally need background information that details the process of creation, detailing both the gold and experience point cost for creation. Sometimes though, even a new monster can benefit from an old template. That’s where chapter five, templates, comes in. It briefly discusses template themes, like an archetypal template, such as chaos, evil, law, or war, or the old favorite, the undead template. Some templates are created where a particular race or type was altered by a template. For example, the Ebon Servitor in the Deluxe Book of Templates leads to the creation of a new orc subrace. The chapter then describes how to add a template to a creature, noting what to look for and how to adjust things like challenge rating or level adjustments.Interestingly enough, while there are no templates present here, they do include a breakdown of all template special attacks and special abilities as found in the SRD. Some of these refer to chapter seven, while those that are native just to the templates, are fully detailed here. Each entry includes what template the ability was taken from. For example, breath weapon, a supernatural ability, is from the half-dragon. Chapter six, bits and pieces, is going to work well for some campaigns and not at all for others. See, chapter six focuses on using parts of monsters to do magic. For example, take elf ears. They can be treated so that they provide a +2 racial bonus to listen checks for one week after which they are ‘ritually consumed.’ The bonuses aren’t big, but almost any time something of this sort pops up, you can be sure monster harvesting is in the future and characters don’t go on adventure for adventure sake, but to harvest bits and pieces. Fine for some campaigns, but not for all. Chapter seven on the other hand, gets back to what the monsters can do. This includes the special attacks, qualities, and conditions that monsters have. It includes all the abilities from the SRD, as well as Monster Geographica: Underground. Abilities are extraordinary (Ex), spell like (Sp), or supernatural (SU) in nature. Each ability is fully detailed and include where the source came from. For example, all-around vision is, an extraordinary ability, gives it a +4 racial bonus on Spot and Search checks and opponents get no flanking bonuses. This ability is typically found in Xorn, as well as Gloom Crawlers among other beasties. Chapter seven is another lengthy one, and includes a lot of material. What’s good is that it’s not just a listing of powers. For example, when invisibility is detailed, it also include listen checks to detect invisible creature, including a table based on what the creature is doing. When looking at poisons, there is a huge table with over a dozen types of poisons, including lich dust, drow poison, purple worm poison, and arsenic. What’s good is that it includes the details of how poisons work (contact, ingested, inhaled, injury), as well as differences between primary and secondary damage. So now that you’ve gotten through the seven chapters of the book, what can the appendices possibly offer? Well, appendix one is a monster-editing checklist. This is a good list that provides a quick round up of things you should be doing as you craft your monster. For example, for speed, does it’s movement type match its description? For attack, have you calculated bab, size, and appropriate statistic? For treasure, if it has magical items, have you included them in the monster’s armor class or attack abilities? Appendix two on the other hand, is for the math headed. It’s a massive cross chart of attack/save AC/DC with numbers going across from five to thirty five and dwon from negative five to thirty nine. Where the columns meet, is what the attack or save percentages are. For example, per the book, a monster with a +13 attack tries to hit a fighter with an armor class of 28. The chance the monster will hit is 30%. On the other hand, if that monster’s attack was +33, it’s chance would be 100%. For those in a hurry to make new monsters, flip to appendix three. Here we have a ‘randomish’ monster generator. It includes tables for determining special qualities, size, type, subtype, hit dice, movement, natural armor, and natural weapons. Good for those who need a little something to get the brain flowing.In many ways, the book is the missing link between the Dungeon Master’s Guide and the Monster Manual. While it admits that judging the final CR of a creature is still part art and part science, it allows you to at least see what that science is. By providing all the special qualities and attacks in one book, along with information on all the different types and subtypes, it makes itself a one stop shop for monster creation.</blockquote>

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